PowerPoint Animations can give life to your presentation by increasing visual appeal. Just a note: use caution when incorporating animations. Animations used for a strategic purpose can be very effective. Animations for the sake of animations can detract from a quality presentation.

Once you have figured out the basics of slide creation in PowerPoint and have all of your text and pictures in place, you can begin to add animations to make your presentation more exciting and highlight different parts of it.

What is Animation?

Animation includes all of the entrances, exits, transitions, changes in size and color and movements that you can add to pictures, text, shapes, SmartArt graphics, and other objects in PowerPoint. They’re used to focus on the important points of your presentation and get viewers more interested. You can apply animations to individual slides or all of your slides.

Different Kinds of Animation Effect:

Entrance: These effects include fading into foucs, flying onto the slide from the edge, or bouncing into view.

Exit: These effects include making an object fly off the slide, disappearing from view or spiraling off the slide.

Emphasis: These effects include making objects get bigger or smaller in size, changing color, or spinning on its center.

Motion Paths: These include moving an object up or down, left or right, or in a certain pattern (like a star or circle).

Adding Slide Transitions:

To add a transition between your slides, go to the “Animation” tab and in the “Transition to This Slide” area, you can select how you want the slide to appear; you can also accompany that with sound and choose the speed of the transition. You can use different transitions between different slides or you can apply the same transition to all of your slides by selecting “Apply to All.” You can also choose how to advance your slides, you can either set it to change “On Mouse Click” or “Automatically After____” by filling in an amount of time you want it to change after.

Adding Animation:

To add an animation, first click on the object that you want to animate, then go to the “Animations” tab. Click on the “Custom Animation” button. On the right-side of your screen, the Custom Animation toolbar will appear. To add an effect, click on “Add Effect” and select which type you want (entrance, exit, emphasis, motion path) from the drop-down menu. Decide which animation you want and select it. Now you will see it listed in the white text box and you will be able to edit it. To modify the animation, click on it. You can now decide how you want it to start (either “On Click,” “With Previous,” or a certain amount of time “After Previous”), which direction you want it to go (depending on the animation you may have the options of in or out, up or down, clock-wise or counter-clockwise, etc), and finally the speed from “Very Slow” to “Very Fast.” Once you’ve made your selections, you can preview the animations by clicking the “Play” button (shows small version of the preview) or “Slide Show” button (shows full screen preview). You are able to add more than one effect to objects by following the same steps as outlined above. However, make sure to order the animations in a logical sense: an entrance should come first, followed by a motion or an emphasis, and finished with an exit.

Editing Animations:

You can also use the Custom Animation toolbar to edit animations. You can use the “Modify: Box” to change the start, direction, or speed of the animation or you can change the animation completely by selecting a new animation from the drop-down “Change” menu. You can also change the order of your animations. The numbers on the left of the animation name, indicate the order of the animations, so if you want to have a certain one come before another you can change the order. To do this, you can either drag and drop or click on the one you want to move and use the blue-green arrows under the text box to move that animation up or down. You can also remove an animation by selecting the animation and clicking on the “Remove” button.

We hope you found these tips helpful. If you want to learn more about animations or using PowerPoint, check our PowerPoint Webinar.